Read Online My Prizes: An Accounting by Thomas Bernhard - Free Book Online

breakfast, said my aunt, and I thought yes, maybe after breakfast and I ate breakfast and ate breakfast but still nothing came to me. Now I had my suit for best occasions on, the anthracite-colored single-breasted one, and I’d tied my tie and was struggling to swallow the last mouthfuls of breakfast and still I didn’t have eventhe trace of an idea for a speech, suddenly I had absolutely nothing in my head except a feeling of fear, I was afraid of what was ahead of me, if I couldn’t know precisely what I was afraid of, I feared something perverse, something unlawful, something unjust, something utterly embarrassing. My aunt was all ready to go, once again she looked very elegant and I admired her. If only I’d declined, and now didn’t have to go to the Ministry, I said. And then, at the peak of my despair, I sat down at the table in the window of my tiny room and typed a few sentences on my machine. Again it was no speech, as they were requiring of me, again it was only a few sentences that I had in my head. Only a few sentences, I said to my aunt, and I was embarrassed to read her these newly minted sentences. I also wouldn’t have had time to, for we had to leave, we caught a taxi on the corner of the Obkirchergasse and the Grinzinger Allee and drove into the city. This journey was the journey to the scaffold. The prize ceremony was taking place in the so-called Audience Chamber of the Culture and Art and Education Ministry. When we arrived, all the so-called honored guests were already there. Only the Minister was still missing, Herr Piffl-Perčevič, a former Secretary of the Provincial Agricultural Departmentin Steiermark with a walrus moustache, who had been summoned straight from his position in Steiermark to become Minister of the Ministry of Culture, Art, and Education. By his friend in the party, who’d just become Chancellor. I had always loathed this Piffl-Perčevič, for he was incapable of uttering a sentence correctly and it may be that he understood something about Steiermarkian calves and cows and Upper Steiermarkian pigs and Lower Steiermarkian hotbeds, but he understood absolutely nothing about art and culture although he talked about art and culture everywhere nonstop. But that’s something else. The Minister with his walrus moustache came into the Audience Chamber and the prize ceremony could begin. The Minister had taken his seat in the first row where the prize candidates were sitting, five or six of them excluding me. This prize ceremony also began with a piece of music, it was a piece for strings and the Minister listened to it with his head tilted to the left. The musicians weren’t in good shape and they stumbled in a lot of places, but on such occasions there’s no expectation ever of accurate playing. It pained me that the musicians stumbled over all the best passages in the piece. Finally the piece came to an end and the Minister was handed a piece of paper by his secretarywith what was probably a text the secretary had written, whereupon the Minister stood up and went to the lectern and gave a speech. I no longer remember the content of the speech, it introduced all the prizewinners, some of their biographical details were read out and some of their works were named. Naturally I couldn’t know if what the Minister had read out about my co-winners was correct, what he said about me was almost all wrong and crude and manufactured out of thin air. He mentioned, for example, that I had written a novel that takes place on an island in the South Seas, which in that moment when the Minister shared this information was absolute news to me. Everything the Minister said was wrong, and evidently his secretary had confused me with someone else, but it didn’t make me more upset, because I’m used to politicians always talking nonsense on such occasions and things that have been conjured out of midair at best, why should it be any different with Herr Piffl-Perčevič. But what did wound me